


to speak with levity of these limits

by anethicalbutcher



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M, POV John Watson, Post-Episode: The Abominable Bride, Time Travel, interdimensional travel?, kind of?, to them at least, where's the tag for that, — written à la book canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23304823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anethicalbutcher/pseuds/anethicalbutcher
Summary: Turning from his place at the corner of the curtains, he worried the pipe between his teeth as he held the lit match still between his fingers, and faced a harrowed gaze at me. This expression of his, which I had seen the number of times I can count on one hand, was only brought on by his most difficult and disquieting cases. “I’m afraid I do know you, Watson, in places I haven't been.”Holmes and Watson discuss what happened at the Reichenbach Falls — and what mysterious implications follow it.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26





	to speak with levity of these limits

**Author's Note:**

> so recently i was rewatching abominable bride; i just can't wrap my head around the very end of the episode. love the whole concept, love sherlock going to his mind palace to pretend he's in the past while he's hopped up, whatever (oh wait did anybody remember that whole thing about the ku klux klan?? you guys remember that? how did they get away with that) the ending — so i made this little ditty while i was thinking about it. somewhere between show canon and book canon?

Outside, the orange of the lamplights wavered against the beginning of an evening storm. Early enough, the only signs of its coming were the dark powder-blue that washed from the sky to the streets, and the faint drizzle whose wet spots reflected on the sidewalk like a million little mirrors.

—

“Watson?”

“Hmm?”

“Is it strange to say that I feel as if I could meet you in a thousand worlds, and still know your face?”

I pondered his question, sunken into my armchair on such a particularly drizzly and dark evening. “Yes, but no stranger than you usually speak.”

Holmes upended the burnt contents of his pipe into a tray with a good-natured smile — or what I had heard in his voice as a smile, as he appeared to me as a near silhouette against the backdrop of a window. “I do mean it; I sometimes feel I know you as if I was everywhere at once.”

“Even in China?”

He chortled at my inquisition. “Further than China, Watson.” 

“Antarctica? I don't believe anyone lives there, surely.”

He stuffed more dark shag into his bowl. _“Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.”_

His spontaneous phrase served only to vex me further — as was typical between us. “How’s that?”

“Do you ever consider the things outside of the realms of our experiences?”

I thought hard for a moment. “No.”

“I’ve been reading a plethora of journals, scientific and otherwise — _Dynamics of an Asteroid_ , for one — they've been most enlightening to me as of late.”

“I thought you didn't have a fondness for mathematics and the like?”

He lighted the end of his pipe with a match, its warm scent wafting over to me in clouds of grey smoke. “The topic was of special interest to me at the time, though I’ll admit most of it is past my depth.”

I was assuredly on a similar track. “Inverse measures — of the soul; what does it mean, exactly?”

Turning from his place at the corner of the curtains, he worried the pipe between his teeth as he held the lit match still between his fingers, and faced a harrowed gaze at me. This expression of his, which I had seen the number of times I can count on one hand, was only brought on by his most difficult and disquieting cases. Its contradiction with his previously jovial disposition disturbed me. “I’m afraid I do know you, Watson, in places I haven't been.”

Understanding his statement as absurd, I laughed at what I assumed was another clever trick of his. “Perhaps you’ve seen some other intelligent-looking man with a cane and a well-coiffed moustache at a market somewhere?”

His mood was now noticeably darkened; his brow was creased, the shape of his lip suggesting distress. “No. Places _I_ haven’t been. I believe we’ve met in places neither of us have ever been — in fact, places we've never even seen before.”

I couldn’t help but think he might have been pulling some strange ruse on me, if it weren't for his grave demeanor. “What in Heaven’s name are you speaking of?”

He shook out his match without looking away; his eyes were that of a man haunted. “I believe there could be worlds like ours outside of this one, Watson, separate but the same, in an inversion or a variation of the other, or perhaps something else entirely.” 

“Something else?”

“Whether it's before, or after, or somewhere incomprehensible to us.”

His increasingly manic tone began to gather hairs on the back of my neck. “Before — after what? Holmes, what _are_ you saying?”

His steely eyes bared down upon me as his long legs took determined strides over to his own chair, leaning far forwards towards me as he sat. “That night; the waterfall. Do you remember?”

“Remember what — ?” 

All at once, I was suddenly struck by the memory of such a vision; a moonlit waterfall, a revolver concealed in my hand, Holmes and Professor Moriarty dangling over the precipice. 

_What’s he like? The other me?_

His question struck me like a thunderclap. I found myself unable to move. “I don’t understand.”

“But you _remember_.” 

Against anything, any scrap of logical evidence — I did. “Then I don't believe it.”

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible…” His eyes moved over to the rain-dotted windowpane again, his naturally contemplative face obscured by traces of a particular uneasiness. “In this matter, I don't know what the limits of the possible may be.”

My lip had quivered, as one does when faced with such things which are ineffable. “You’re talking nonsense. It was some strange dream.”

“That we both had?”

“It was a fantasy. Perhaps a drug-induced hallucination.”

“Since when had I started calling you ‘John’?” he said, words which I recognized as my own from that night — that mysterious moment. I gawked, and could only repeatedly open and close my mouth with nothing to say. 

“I went over the edge of those falls,” he continued, “and I woke up here. We both did.”

“Yet there's not a scratch on your body!”

He shifted in his seat, making more room to anxiously gesticulate with his hands. “After the event, here, you told me the drop of water could infer a Reichenbach — how could something so narrowly specific be an incidental suggestion?”

“I wasn't thinking — ”

“But you were! You knew — knew it in some capacity. You understood.”

I had understood. In that living room during our conversation I most certainly did not, but I had then. _Then._ When was ‘then’? If only I could figure out — if I had known when all of this had transpired...

I put two fingers to my throbbing temple, attempting to soothe away such confusing thoughts. “So Moriarty is dead, then.”

“I’ve no idea,” my companion replied blithely, “there’s a much more pressing matter — our meeting.”

“Our meeting?” I hadn’t recalled anything to do with the day I met Holmes, nor its relevance to the current. 

“I believe we’ve met elsewhere. Us, but then again, not us.” He leaned forward again. “I told you about those flying contraptions, telephones you carry in your pocket. It wasn’t a simple supposition of the future; I had seen it with my very own eyes. I saw — ” He chewed his lip, as if hesitant to speak. “I saw you.”

“Me?” This tunneled rabbit-hole seemed to be never ending. I was becoming more light-headed by the moment. “And what exactly was I doing?”

“Never mind that. What I do know is that we were friends, best of friends, as we are now — you have no memory of it?”

I shook my head. “None at all. The waterfall is the only thing I remember.”

Holmes could have looked like he was on a case, if his fingers weren’t trembling as they were. “We were in an aeroplane, dressed quite differently, the same age as we are now, in a different time.”

“So this flying machine with both of us in it was in the future?” I asked doubtfully.

“Yes!” he shouted, then sat back in his chair. “That is to say, no. I believe it was in _a_ future, but not our future.”

“A different future.” 

“Yes!” he said again, “an alternative future.”

I pressed my lips tightly together, nearing the end of my comprehension. “You mean to tell me we’ll be wandering around in some alternative future together, _and_ we’ve been puttering about on the sides of Swiss waterfalls with our archenemy?”

His face only looked more timid. “I think it’s all happening at the same time.”

My expression then must have frightened him (I in fact felt myself paling), for he quickly began explaining his thought. “Perhaps none of this moves front-to-back — perhaps instead it is a conglomeration of moments, events, possibly entire worlds.”

“What is?”

“Time,” he answered. “I believe we have experienced moving backwards and forwards in time — and I believe we’ve been traveling through the dimensions of time and space itself.”

“Backwards and forwards in time!”

“From our point of view, anyway.” 

I was nearly done-in by this point. I had always believed my judgement to be some of the most sound; but in this case, all common sense had been abandoned. “So we’ve been in the future and the past, as we are now.”

“Not only that, Watson, I’ve been in worlds outside of our own — ”

“For goodness’ sake!”

“ — where the other John lives.”

Upon that, the realization came to me. “The John you met on the plane; he was who I asked you about. What he was like.”

Holmes solemnly nodded. 

“And that John is — ”

“With me,” he said. “With the other me. Solving cases, just the same.” Such a thought would have been nearly touching, if the situation hadn’t felt so sobered. 

“Here, the Falls, the aeroplane — I’ve been flitting between them like pages of a book, thumbing back and forth between each surface.” He was restlessly puffing on his pipe, the haze growing a heavy curtain over the room. “The one constant has been you.”

“How do you know it was me? He might have looked like me, spoken like me, but — how do you know it was _me?_ ”

Holmes gave me a sidelong glance. “I don’t know; something intrinsic, I suppose.”

Quiet blanketed our conversation as the weight of it all finally found itself upon us. The sun had sunk behind the buildings completely now, yet neither of us rose to turn up the gas. “What was he like?”

“The other you?”

“The other _you_ ,” I corrected, awkwardly smoothing a line on my trousers. “Was he — much like you?”

“Uncomfortably so,” Holmes said; the edge of his mouth made a weary smile as he lit another match. “The world is very different for them — us — wherever we were, or are. But we still... ”

Holmes caught the end of his pipe with his teeth before he could finish. “We’re very much alike, us and our other pair.”

He studied the pattern on the Persian rug spread over the floor, ostensibly somewhere deep in thought. I was at a loss for words, for questions; his distant contemplation spread within me a sense of loneliness and longing. “Have I missed something?”

He didn’t turn his head up to look at me, instead keeping his curiously reticent eyes to the ground. “We both saw through that distant looking-glass, Watson, touched hands with something on the other side. In those moments, the me from another world and I both inhabited one brain, one respective single consciousness. I knew everything he did, felt all that he felt.”

I felt a nervous twitch run through my fingers. “And what did you feel?”

The tobacco crackled red as he took an inhale, slowly exhaling it in a ruminant grey wreath. “That times are very different in other worlds.”

 _What’s he like? The other me, in the other place?_ The question had been something much closer to my breast, something not even indirectly to be spoken about. My unreasonable heart threatened to pound its way out of its cavity, and I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket to daub at my brow. He wasn’t thinking of the same things I was; I tried to cast such speculation out of my mind, yet his sorrowful face in the firelight made me think otherwise.

I noticed the slightest tremor in the pipe between his lips. “He adores you, you know.”

Then he smiled, the kind one does when one is exhausted — his eyes were unbearably wistful.

We let a silence slip between us. The room had become increasingly dim, an etherized light coming from the lamps. Holmes’ hypothesis may have been right, for each second between us felt comparable to a year — I wanted to lean towards him, take his hand, say something that meant something. Eons passed in that living room, with just the two of us to witness it. 

“Watson,” he said, and sighed. “John.”

“Sherlock.” I’d never said his name aloud, yet somehow it felt very normal to say — quite natural. “I would know you a thousand worlds over. I’m absolute that he knows you as I know you — essential.” 

“Elementary.” He looked at me the way I’ve seen him look at the stars, now appearing apparition-like in the twilight. “Do you know, out of all of the John Watsons I’ve met, you still hold place as my favourite?”

“Best not to tell the other me that.” 

The tension eased beneath his grin. His low laugh rolled around in his chest as he puffed once more. “I suspect I may never see him again. Who knows what might come of it; but I consider it an accident — or perhaps a force of will — that made such an occurrence possible.”

Another brown-studied cloud of smoke drifted from his bowl. “Watson; such other worlds are undeniably different. Yet I believe you and I to always be the same.”

“How so?”

He rose from his chair, and I followed out of courtesy. I went with him to the window, the rain obscuring the blustering streets outside. “Imagine — just on the other side of this window — another Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are finding themselves at home in a flat on Baker Street, by the fire, in the chairs.” 

He turned to me, and said no more words. The rain slid down in rivulets along the brick streets, over metal awnings, cab tires. It seemed as if the whole world were raining, where the spectre of a London Eye watched over our corner of the Earth. Reader, you may never find the recounting of this story in the Strand — for times are very different in other places. But in such a moment, standing by his side, across a multitude of worlds —

— why not embrace what could possibly be?

**Author's Note:**

> The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet, time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, _The Over-Soul_ , 1841
> 
> thank you


End file.
